Ronald Reagan Quotes

In contrast, fear societies are societies in which dissent is banned.

I'd never been in a police state. I didn't know what it was. I knew that it was, in the general way that people know that two and two is four, but it had no emotional value for me until I found myself in the middle of it.

A functioning police state needs no police.

A state that suppresses all freedom of speech, and which by imposing the most terrible punishments, treats each and every attempt at criticism, however morally justified, and every suggestion for improvement as plotting to high treason, is a state that breaks an unwritten law.

Can someone within that society walk into the town square and say what they want without fear of being punished for his or her views? If so, then that society is a free society. If not, it is a fear society.

You see these dictators on their pedestals, surrounded by the bayonets of their soldiers and the truncheons of their police. Yet in their hearts there is unspoken – unspeakable fear. They are afraid of words and thoughts!

Soviet repression taught the Russians that hope and trust are dangerous, inimical, and treacherous

When people are intimidated about having their own opinions, oppression is at hand.

Dictatorship and authentic literature are incompatible... The writer is the natural enemy of dictatorship.

Under the rule of a repressive whole, liberty can be made into a powerful instrument of domination.

Many Communist government officials have a rigid, dictatorial power, but they live in constant suspicion and fear of anything that might undermine the power they have.

Fascism is not defined by the number of its victims, but by the way it kills them.

For an entire populace, change, growth, and spontaneity were dangerous. Acting upon a personal desire, whispering a hidden longing, revealing your true feelings - all the human actions we think of as essential to a character - had be censored by the self lest they be punished by the state.

As long as the people don't fear the truth, there is hope. For once they fear it, the one who tells it doesn't stand a chance. And today, truth is still beautiful... but so frightening.

We live in a frightened time, and people self-censor all the time and are afraid of going into some subjects because they are worried about violent reactions.

I mean, they censor your work when they're scared of it.

Fear generates anger, and fear generates violence, and those were part of what built the Saudi state.

Will dissent be permitted? The answer to that question will determine whether the society is a free society or a fear society.

The strength and power of despotism consists wholly in the fear of resistance.

Authoritarian political ideologies have a vested interest in promoting fear, a sense of the imminence of takeover by aliens and real diseases are useful material.

Under conditions of tyranny it is far easier to act than to think.

Censorship always defeats it own purpose, for it creates in the end the kind of society that is incapable of exercising real discretion.

Those who begin coercive elimination of dissent soon find themselves exterminating dissenters. Compulsory unification of opinion achieves only the unanimity of the graveyard.

Many a time freedom has been rolled back - and always for the same sorry reason: fear.

Persecution is the first law of society because it is always easier to suppress criticism than to meet it.